MARATTI, CARLO. - Painter, b. at Camerano (Ancona) on 15 May 1625, d. at Rome on 15 Dec. 1713. Exponent and leader of the pictorial current descended, through Sacchi and Albani, from the Bolognese Academy of the Carracci.
He adopted many attitudes of the contemporary Baroque of P. da Cortona and Gaulli, tempering their exuberance and impetuosity into a painting at once staid and rhetorical, dominated by the Raphaelesque canons of grace, measure and propriety. He also absorbed the attitudes and manners of artists of different and even contrasting tendencies, such as Reni in particular, Albani and Domenichino, Guercino and Romanelli, Bernini and Poussin. Also to be noted is the influence upon him of the archaeologist and scholar Gian Pietro Bellori, the leading exponent of seventeenth-century idealist aesthetics, who soon converted M. to the principle of ideal painting, chosen from natural beauties, superior to nature, and extolled the painter's works as the exemplary realization of his theories on art. All these characteristics of the works around 1660 are not infrequently enlivened by Berninian touches, by Renian chromatic preciousness (Presepe in S. Giuseppe dei Falegnami in Rome, 1650; Presepe and Flight into Egypt, 1652, in S. Isidoro Agricola, which form part of one of the most important decorative undertakings executed by M. in fresco and oil; Visitation in S. Maria della Pace) or by luministic touches in the manner of Guercino (S. Francesca Romana of Ascoli Piceno; S. Agostino in S. Maria dei Sette Dolori in Rome; Annunciata of Anagni, 1659). Around and after 1670, M. tried his hand at dynamic and crowded compositions, at times attaining an intensity of colour almost Venetian in character (altarpieces of the Gesù and of the Vallicella), more often inclining toward turgid and broadened forms (altarpieces of S. Carlo al Corso; ceiling of Palazzo Altieri; pendentives of the chapels of the Presentation and of the Choir in St. Peter's, Vatican). An inexhaustible creator of altarpieces, M. also tried his hand at compositions of a profane character, in which he had especially Domenichino in mind; for the most part dispersed among foreign museums. Among the painters of his time, even outside Rome, he excels however in portraiture, where he attains a profound psychological penetration, yet never divorced from a subtle idealization of the sitter. After having begun with simple and intimate portraits, inspired by the manner of Domenichino and Sacchi, among which should be mentioned the most noble Clement IX of the Vatican Picture Gallery, M. passes in his mature years to emphatic portraits, "in action," an exact exemplification of Berninian canons. Of this second phase of M.'s portraiture, now dispersed, an example remains in the image, believed to be of his daughter Faustina, in the guise of Cleopatra, in the Museum of Palazzo Venezia, remarkable for the Baroque opulence of its forms, the density of the impasto and the delicacy of the chromatic harmonies. - See pl. I.
Bibliography9 works
Amalia Mezzetti